English Resources
In addition to my biology degree, I also have a degree in English. Like most of my good friends, I enjoy time spent with the written word (which is a rare commodity) and am in a position to do something to improve its status.
When I have time, I tutor students in writing. Although writing skills are considered essential for the twenty-first century worker, schools are spending increasingly less and less time teaching them. And when they do, they teach things (like “100 synonyms for ‘said’”) that we then have to unteach at the college level and in the workplace.
Please note that these handouts do not constitute a curriculum of any sort, nor are they meant to. They are simply summaries that I and the students I’ve tutored have found useful. If you are a teacher or college instructor, and would like to use these in your classroom, please read my permissions page. Thank you.
Items with a red check mark () are new in the last 90 days. Items with a blue chevron () have been updated in the last ninety days.
Grammar
Grammar describes words, the roles they play, and how they can be combined into phrases and clauses to form meaning, and how those phrases and clause can be combined into sentences to form complete thoughts.
Resources coming soon.
Usage
Usage refers to the rules a language uses for constructing sentences. Engish has several different types of usage. The type I primarily focus on here is called "Standard English."
- Usage Guide — v. 1.2 (Updated August, 2016)
Diction
Diction refers to word choice. The emphasis here is not on correctlness, but appropriateness: choosing the words that best communicate the writer's meaning.
- Transition Words and Phrases — v. 2.0 (Updated February, 2014)
- Red Alert Words — v. 1.0 (March, 2012) Words that many beginning and experienced writers tend to overuse.
Mechanics
Mechanics refers to those items which primarily affect written, rather than spoken, language: spelling, capitalization, punctuation, abbreviations, and page format.
Writing
The resources above are about words and sentences. While words and sentences both have meaning, paragraphs are where ideas are born and live. Therefore, the following resources are about paragraph-level concerns: using the tools available to writers to construct paragraphs that convey ideas from the writer's mind to the reader's mind, and to avoid having ideas die untimely and ugly deaths.
Style
Closely related to usage is style: the choices a writer makes about metaphors, sentence length and structure, unity and parallelism, and consistency, among other things.
Resources coming soon.
Forms
Different types of writing require different approaches.
Resources coming soon.
Literature
This section includes resources for studying and teaching poetry, short fiction, novels, drama, nonfiction, and speeches.
Poetry
- Poetry Glossary — Long Version, v. 1.2 (Updated July, 2013)
A complete guide to figurative language, poetic devices and forms, rhyme, and meter, all with extensive examples. - Poetry Glossary — Short Version, v. 1.1 (Updated July, 2013)
An abbreviated form of the above.
Fiction
- Literature Cheat Sheet — v. 1.1 (Updated January, 2014)
A brief guide to what you need to know in order to talk inteligently about literature. - Writing About Plot — v. 1.0
How to analyze a plot for conflict and write about it. - Freytag Pyramid — in .svg, which you can drop into documents, presentations, and web pages.
Nonfiction
Resources coming soon.